Kennewick Man: to disturb or not to disturb?

Most of you, I’m sure, have heard of Kennewick Man. Discovered a decade ago in Washington, the 9,300-year-old skeleton is as notable for its legal discoveries as scientific ones.

Long story short: Scientists wanted to study the skeleton, American Indian tribes in the region said the bones belonged to them as part of the NAGPRA law, and they wanted to re-bury them. The government sided with the American Indians. This is America, so the scientists sued.

After a long series of court cases, which included support for the scientists from the Texas Historical Commission, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the scientists in 2004, ending the legal battle. The researchers won because no modern tribe could prove direct ancestral rights to a 9,000-year-old skeleton.

But since the court’s ruling, Congress has tried twice to extend NAGPRA to cover even ancient remains on American Indian tribal lands. Now a Washington congressman has filed a bill to prevent further attempts, legislation that would clarify NAGPRA to exclude ancient remains.

I have some sympathy for the Americans Indians — every time bones are found on their lands they must hire archaeologists to prove their connection to the remains. But is it really an acceptable argument that just because you’re living somewhere, any bones buried there, even if they’re nine millennia old, must be your ancient relatives?

Don’t think so.

The case has at least one other Texas connection. One of the eight plaintiffs was Robson Bonnichsen, who moved his Center for the Study of the First Americans from Oregon to Texas A&M in 2002. Though Bonnichsen died at the age of 62, in late 2004, having his center is a nice boost for the state’s archaeology. And in my view, it is seeking to answer the most interesting question in archaeology today: who were the first humans to come to this hemisphere, and how did they get here?

32 Responses

The wrongness of the anti-science position on this would be baffling if it were not so transparently political in motive. The resistance to science does not exist in the Canadian Indians, nor in the regions south of the the United States. Only here, where we have trained ourselves to indulge in the most facile victimhood politics do we see this kind of idiocy. My bet is that the congress person’s effort to step in again to derail the sommonsense, reasonable, normal study of this find will go no where. And that is a good thing.

Doesn’t look like an American Indian? I’m 1/4 Cherokee, but I have blue eyes and blonde hair. I was robbed! I do have a natural affinity to grab a spear and a horse and chase down deer, though, and learned how to fish with my bare hands. I’ll bet if you take the dude’s picture up there and photoshop it, put a spear in his hand, some long black hair and a feather in his head, he’d pass.

Considering until the invasion of white settlers in 1492, American Indians were the only ones that occupied what is now known as the U.S.”9 millennia” ago as you quote, the answer to your ridiculous question is YES! Would you appreciate people digging up your ancestors to study or put them on display? This is not only disrespectful but appalling for this continual disgrace to be allowed to occur. This isn’t just happening to remains that are thousands of years old, it is also happening to our ancestors from less than a couple hundred years ago! That would be your great-great grandparents, Eric. If you don’t agree…please let us know where your ancestors from 9 millennia ago or better yet, a couple hundred years ago are buried and we will go dig them up for you, see how you feel about it then. Bet you won’t like it one bit!

Can’t speak for anybody else obviously, but personally I would love for some scientist with a brush to come and dig me up in a few hundred or thousand years. Rather than being stuck under ground you get to scare the kids in a fancy museum…

You really don’t want to dig up my ancestors though. They just weren’t very pretty. I am the first one in a thousand years..

I hope you didn’t take my comments as being disrespectful toward Native Americans. They weren’t intended as such, and I’m glad you’ve chosen to join the discussion.

The point I am trying to make, indeed I believe it’s the one the scientists were trying to make, is that it’s simply impossible to know whose ancestor Kennewick Man is. I realize this is an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree. But given the continual migrations of human populations in both modern and ancient times, it’s almost certain the Kennewick Man isn’t related to the Natives now living in present-day Washington.

As to the study of more recent Native American ancestors, I was under the impression that NAGPRA protects those remains. If that’s not the case then the law ought to be protecting them.

Finally, the goal here, by the scientists, is to establish where and when the first humans came to the Americas. I would think that would be a goal shared by Native Americans. Don’t you want to know, ultimately, where your peoples came from?

American Indians were the only ones that occupied what is now known as the U.S.”9 millennia” ago as you quote…

How do you know, NDN? That’s not what the illegal immigrants are saying! They say this was their land first, and that the white people stole it. I say it was my relatives in Porter, Texas, because they’ve been there forever and won’t leave.

Many, many cultures have occupied american lands folks. Floating from eveywhere…hunting giant herds of seal…washing up in a storm…etc, etc. Man has been in the water for at least 30,000 years. The Bering straits were only one way to travel. Battles took place. Cultures parished. If the white man found out he might have been here first, all the little perks of being a native american could disappear. This reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons. Flanders finds proof there’s no God. What does he do? He hides it & continues praying!

Reading the comments leads me to believe that none of you are intelligent enough to make an informed decision on your own. It is scientific fact that man/woman were formed starting millions of years ago and throgh the ages we have developed cultures of our own, but this does not excuse the fact that we are all related in some form. If we protected all the lands and burial sites and conformed to every cutures wishes we would ourselves have no place to live. Get with the big picture who really cares who is digging someone up, your body is a temporary vehicle it is your soul that matters. I find it interesting to know about lost cultures even if it means digging them up. My point if King Tut’s exhibition came to your town would you go. If the Indians were not the first ones here so what, big deal what is the matter with the truth.

” When C. Loring Brace, 75, saw a picture of Kennewick Man’s skull accompanying a New York Times article in 1996, he instantly knew where his ancestors came from.

“One look at that thing, and I knew it was going to relate to the Ainu of Japan,” he said.

Brace, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, had to wait nearly nine years to study Kennewick Man. He visited the bones for the first time last summer.

He knew where Kennewick Man’s ancestors fit on the world map because he has carefully measured about 10,000 skeletons over nearly 30 years.

…

Kennewick Man, and the handful of other ancient skeletons that have been found, are reshaping the way scientists view North American history. And the Bering Land Bridge theory now appears a little simplistic, they say.

It’s likely that waves of migrations came to North America, perhaps starting thousands of years before people first crossed the Bering Land Bridge.

“The Kennewick Man skeleton is a piece of all our histories,” said Thomas Stafford Jr., a Lafayette, Colo., geochemist. “Who’s the pioneer – the guy who came in a covered wagon, the American Indians that came 8,000 years ago or the people before them?”

Brace said Kennewick Man supports the theory that ancient people traveled from Asia to North America by boat or on foot along coastlines and over ice sheets.

About 12,000 years ago, prehistoric hunters, called the Clovis people, followed big game animals across the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Modern Native Americans are likely their descendants.

Brace said Kennewick Man is likely related to the ancient Jomon, who also were the ancestors of the Ainu people of Japan. The new theory is a radical shift in the long-accepted ancient history book.”

OK, the scientists won because no modern tribe could prove direct ancestral rights to the skeleton. So what happens if, through DNA testing or otherwise, the scientists later discover that the tribes that were claiming the bones really are descended from the skeleton? Are the scientists then hoisted by their own petard, as it were?

The fact is I have no idea who my ancestors were 9,000 years ago. There’s no way I could know that, and neither could you. And even if we could find them, the change in their genetic makeup over ensuing generations would mean they’d be no more like you or I than the fellow sitting next to you on the bus.

You are of course free to claim to know otherwise by revealed wisdom, i.e., religion, faith, magic, call it what you will. And we shall respect your right to believe that. What we shall not respect is your right to impose that belief on everybody else by constraining their actions by that belief. You have no such right.

Imagine a Creationist demanding that no one unearth fossiles because it was an affront to their belief in Biblical inerrancy. They’d be laughed away out of hand–except perhaps in Kansas (you’re not from Kansas are you?)

By the by, a little epistomology here: you’ve come on this forum anonymously claiming to be a Native American, and using that claim as a position of moral authority from which to lecture us. How do we know that claim is true? This is the Internet, after all.

I find the entire range of theories re: how the Americas were peopled fascinating. First came the land bridge across the Bering Strait idea. A spate of new and more controversial theories followed in more recent times.

One such idea, a couple of scientist/adventurers following the California coastline in a canoe, demonstrating how peoples might have gotten around the ice that mostly covered the lands between Alaska and here. I’m guessing also that the coastlines would have been a little warmer than the interior.

The Kon-Tiki idea has also been floated (no pun intended!) by other memebers of the scientific community, whereby Polynesian peoples might have bumped into South America during their migrations, eventually co-mingling with the populations who arrived via the land routes.

Scientists also believe that at least some of the land route peoples moved southward at a faster rate than previously thought. That is in lieu of the notion that they made rude settlements, stayed put until overpopulation or food shortages forced them south.

The California group and others are all looking for evidence of something or someone earlier than Clovis, and a few insist that they have found it.

The Clovis people surely didn’t just float down from the sky in a hot-air balloon; (Here hum the theme from Twilight Zone)! They had to get there from somewhere, leaving traces along the route.

The California duo think it was by sea, and that the evidence has long since washed away into the sea.

I too am 1/4 Cherokee, and am sensitive to the emotions and traditions of the Native American traditions. However, I have lived among them only briefly while working in Oklahoma, instead of being steeped in the culture since birth. Therefore, I can make no claim to understanding nor fully grasping their feelings on this subject.

I think some people miss the main point the Umitilla, and other tribes, are trying to make in regards to Kennewick Man, and other ancient remains. It is more an issue of soverignty and rights- you are on their lands, digging or collecting without representation or permission by their government. If you were to go to Mexico and dig around and try to take what you found, that would be illegal because you didn’t have permission by the Mexican government to do so. If Indian nations were treated with the same respect here, we might not see these kinds of battles. The author cites that Canadian/First Nation relations are not so contentious- primarily because Canada is more respectful of First Nations’ rights. It’s all about respect, and it’s a shame that ancient people have become more important than living, soverign nations.

Maybe I should clarify what I meant about being in a tribe’s territory. I did not mean the narrow and often unrelated land “given” to a tribe by the US government for a reservation. I meant the anncestral lands of a tribe- their original territory. While the government might define the use of that land differently, tribes still view it as their territory. NAGPRA is only a first step in better respect to Native people, there’s a long more we need to do beyond the confines of that law to heal the wounds of the past in this country. NAGPRA does apply only to items found on federal lands, but is not limited to those items found on reservations.

White people have a secret desire to prove they were here first so they can say, rather than massacring the original inhabitants, they were simply reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. Unfortunately, this is old-fashioned craniometry, which has long since been disproven. This skeleton can never be shown definitively to be either Indian, Caucasian, or anything else. It is just a pile of 9000 year-old bones. Nothing more or less. What we have here are a bunch of “scientists” sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong. Have a little respect. Skeletons, even our own white skeletons, belong in the ground, not in a laboratory. If white people were so interested in researching the First Americans, they wouldn’t have gone to such extremes to kill them all off and eradicate their culture, which they could have “studied” 100 years ago firsthand.

9000 years ago is such a long time ago that what we know about races today doesn’t apply to back then. So to say that Kennewick Man was “white”, “Indian”, or any other race, is innaccurate, because he probably had nothing to do with any of them.

Scientists should be allowed to study the skeleton to learn all they can from it.

Excellent answer. I am past tired of the phony claims made by agenda driven groups stopping the normal processes of science. The Kennewick man apaprently bears no genetic heritage to the Indians who claim the power to control the science. Additionally, you are completely correct. Colonial graves are regularly sampled to gain important insights on their lives and deaths. I am descended from those people, and I recall 0 inquiries for my opinion, much less my permission on those activities.

Scientists do this all over the world,a nd learn greatly.

The reactionary response of those Indians seeking to veto this reasonable and normal research begs the question of what they fear fromt he inquiry?

In my thoughts, the bones in question should be alowed to be burried by the indians after the tests are complete. I know that some people would like to see the bones, me included, but I also respect the feelings and customs of the Indians. Why can’t both the scientists and the Indians get a little of what they want?? The Indians may not want the bones to be tested, but don’t aren’t at least some of them wondering how old the bones are? Though the scientists want to test the bones for study, can’t they respect the Indians and the Indians respect the Scientists??????? I should hope so, I mean after all both parties in question may not get everything they want, but isn’t a little better than niether of them getting anything at all????????

just a general comment: anthropology and archaeology have been used in the past to take advantage of the American Indians, the remains of their peoples have been looted from graves, taken forcefully, and they have been regarded as scientific curiosities for a few hundred years. the attorney general of the united states (years ago) ordered that over 4,000 American Indian skulls be sent to muesems all over the US for anaylsis, graves were looted, many Indians were killed because someone wanted to study their head size for some bogus white supremisist science (craniometry). we’ve taken away the American Indian’s land, natural resources and culture. in the wake of all of these events we could at least give back the bones of their people, even if their are very ancient; that’s why NAGPRA exsists, to establish the rights of the American Indians in dealing and managing with their own remains, to say that white scientists have their right to do what they please is straight up bullshit. at least we could try to fix the smallest of the mistakes we as a society have made.